In the photograph he’s standing by the kitchen counter smiling as he lifts the beer to his mouth. It’s the kind of picture you take at any holiday, the kind where you smile for the photographer and not the photograph.

This is the only photograph she has, the photograph she uses. He never did anyone harm, she writes on the notice. She makes 50 free copies on the Church photocopier, and the lady who shows her how to use it is very nice. The photocopy wears away the soft edges, chisels it all down to light and dark. Nobody says anything as she stands over the photocopier, crying. The machine makes a steady motion under her fingers, like rocking, and when the 50 are through, it shudders to a standstill.

The tape she bought at the dollar store is no good. Each time she tries to pull off a piece one layer sticks to the other until all she is doing is just digging to get the next piece, digging with her fingers ruining everything and still she can't find the end of it. It’s three rolls for a dollar and that’s a dollar wasted. At the Church they tape it to the door for her, and in the Laundromat she tacks it over a notice for a rooming house. She wanders up and down Hastings and Main, sometimes handing them out, sometimes leaving them any place where her grief will hold, 50 places to put these over-exposed pictures of her first-born son.

I’m waiting at the bus stop in front of the church when I see the flyer, when I pick it up off the ground. The young man in the picture looks like he’s just returned home from far away. In four more days, this young man would have been twenty-five. The details spelled out in printed capitals. HE NEVER DID ANYONE HARM. Except by breaking his mother’s heart, I think. Except by dying. It’s windy and rain is coming down Hastings Street over the top of the narrow hotels and I want to hold this moment and that life in my memory, to make it mean something just through this act of witness, this image in my hand. But instead I am distracted by the beginning of rain, and the memories of other deaths, and the movement of birds overhead, the way they dip their wings into the wind, caught in currents of air. And when the bus comes I leave this paper-thin memory of his face behind, hoping that for the next person it will mean all this, and maybe something even more.

truthola.com

July 2013

As a child Sonja Larsen went to 11 different elementary schools and lived in several communes and one cult. As an adult she has worked as a telephone solicitor, bartender, freelance writer, teacher, and youth worker in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. She has a lot of stories. Her work has been published in various literary magazines including Descant, Room, Scissors and Spackle and Flash Forward Press.